Remember pmdesc2 - lists modules with description? Itís a script that lists any or a subset of the modules you have installed, complete with the version number and a description, inspired by Tom Christiansenís pmdesc, but without a number of its annoying flaws, with much higher speed and far cleaner code.

This time around, I added a bunch of options and DOS-newline translation to address problems brought up by Fritz Mehner. In the process, I also cleaned the code up even further and added POD and proper --help etc by way of the inimitable Pod::Usage.

Thatís not a clear win. Because much CPAN-related infrastructure insists on a single dash, almost all modules have a single hyphen, which means the more fastidious form picks up nearly all descriptions correctly. If you allow multiple hyphens, you recover some false negatives, at the cost of some false positives, where the description of the module is malformed but thereís a line with multiple hyphens somewhere nearby. Matching ' --? ' at that point has a couple fewer false positives and still almost no false negatives.

But because of the effect of CPANís rules, itís hardly worth bothering either way, and I prefer to get output thatís consistent with other tools.

I also noticed that if a module has a corresponding POD file (for example: POSIX.pm and POSIX.pod) the description is in the POD file and won't get picked up at all. I applied this patch which seems to fix this (it also prevents POSIX.pm from appearing twice in the resulting list):